Question about the protoevangelium and Eden in relation to evolution

[eustace-scrubb2]

I was raised a fundie born-again creationist.  That changed over a decade ago.  Something I've never fully resolved, however, is how the Garden of Eden and the fall of man and protoevangelium exist without a literal understanding of Genesis.  I hear people say "Christianity and Judaism took a lot from paganism" and I don't have an intelligent, informed response to it.  Can someone help me out here?  I'm not at all looking for a debate, btw.  Just seeking theological help.

Btw for anyone who wasn't around for it, I posted here over a decade ago, while considering converting to Catholicism.  I ended up being chrismated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but for a number of reasons I don't want to get into, left it for the Roman Church.

[fides' Jack]

Not all of Genesis can be metaphorical.  All of Catholic theology, and our understand of salvation history, are built on the fact that there was a first man and woman, that they fell into sin, that we are affected as a result of that.

I'm not sure it's absolutely necessary to believe the universe was created in 6 days, or that 6 days in creation equate to the same time frame that 6 days are now.  But it is absolutely necessary, in order to be a Catholic, to believe God directly created the first man and woman, that they fell into sin, and that as a result the gates of heaven were closed, and concupiscence affects all of us, as "sons of Adam" and "daughters of Eve".

I too turned away from Creationism a number of years ago, but the more time goes on, and I see what's going on in the world today, the more I am willing to turn back to a literal understanding of much of Genesis.  At the very least, Creationism is more amenable to Catholic theology than modern scientific theories such as evolution or the big bang theory.

[eustace-scrubb2]

Thanks, but... I know.  What I'm asking is how theology and scientific data fit together.

I'll just ask a priest about this.

[tinytherese]

Have you checked Catholic Answers? https://www.catholic.com/search?q=creationism

[eustace-scrubb2]

I considered it, but didn't know where I'd find it on there!

Also, lol at me - I have a close friend who works for their radio show! *smacks himself in the forehead*

Edit: oh goodness, those are more articles than I expected... :\

Edited January 31, 2023 by eustace-scrubb2
am dumb

[tinytherese]

On 1/31/2023 at 11:33 AM, eustace-scrubb2 said:

Edit: oh goodness, those are more articles than I expected... 😕

Yea, I feel overwhelmed with their search results too. Just one at a time and take breaks I guess.

On different note, I like your screen name since I'm a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia. The series played a role in my conversion from being lukewarm to devout in my faith.

[eustace-scrubb2]

Danke!  I relate so much to Eustace... I actually broke down crying while reading the Voyage of the Dawn Treader...

It's probably my favorite novel.

Btw I haven't finished it yet, but Catholic Answers' Jimmy Akin actually debated the young earth vs. old earth issue and talked about it later on a podcast.  Here's the link:

https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/should-catholics-be-young-earth-creationists-with-jimmy-akin

Edited February 15, 2023 by eustace-scrubb2
typo

[Luigi]

I've been listening to The Catechism in a Year with Fr. Mike Schmitz on YouTube. He posts a daily video (it's really just audio of him talking, with a transcription that runs on the screen) with four or five paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Each video is twelve-to-fifteen minutes - maybe a little more, maybe a little less. He introduces the day's topic, then reads the paragraphs from the catechism verbatim, then elaborates on them. 

He talks about your question on Days 54-58 (and maybe following - today is Day 59). It might not answer all of your questions, but Fr. Schmitz does address your question directly. 

Here's the link to the playlist (Let us pray!). Scroll down to Day 54 or whatever you want. 

 

[eustace-scrubb2]

On 2/28/2023 at 8:51 PM, Luigi said:

I've been listening to The Catechism in a Year with Fr. Mike Schmitz on YouTube. He posts a daily video (it's really just audio of him talking, with a transcription that runs on the screen) with four or five paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Each video is twelve-to-fifteen minutes - maybe a little more, maybe a little less. He introduces the day's topic, then reads the paragraphs from the catechism verbatim, then elaborates on them. 

He talks about your question on Days 54-58 (and maybe following - today is Day 59). It might not answer all of your questions, but Fr. Schmitz does address your question directly. 

Here's the link to the playlist (Let us pray!). Scroll down to Day 54 or whatever you want. 

 

Thank you!!!

Edited April 28, 2023 by eustace-scrubb2
Redundancy Department of Redundancy

[BarbTherese]

I think of it simply that God never abandoned His creation and has guided it from the dawn of creation in His Will = Direct and Permissive Will of God.  The Old Testament is the story of a people being formed and guided, prepared, toward an overwhelmingly wondrous Event. =  Arrive the New Testament and the birth of Jesus, Second Person of The Blessed Trinity.  Truly God, Truly Man.

"Oh happy fault" (Exultet, Easter Vigil)

""For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isiah 55 (in some translations).

It always fills me with great Joy that the Old Testament is pointing to Jesus (New Testament)who fulfills the Old Testament.

Catholicism is a sort of mystery religion...........we cannot put God into a compartment we can understand in all things.  We have to leave room for Mystery.  The finite trying to grasp The Infinite, totally impossible = mystery!  Reminds me of a story said to be, I think, about St Augustine walking along a beach trying to figure out The Blessed Trinity.  An angel appears to him and tells him he may as well try to count every grain of sand on every beach of the world.

 

 

[fides' Jack]

Perhaps instead of looking for a way to fit the theological into the scientific, we should instead focus on fitting the scientific into the theological.

This is a really interesting read.  I don't pretend to understand everything herein, but I understand enough to know its significance.  What's more interesting is that this hasn't been widely shared...  I imagine there are rebuttals out there which purport to disprove this study.  Perhaps someone with more experience and/or resources than I can find something like that.  I emphasized a few key points by bolding.

Quote

Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth

One of the foremost objections to the Bible’s account of creation and the Flood is the time scale. Mainstream science asserts that the earth itself is some 4.5 billion years old and that multicellular life has existed for about 600 million years. Yet the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 constrain the age of the earth to approximately 6,000 years. If the Bible is reliable in all matters on which it speaks, how is this huge discrepancy in time scales to be reconciled?
In 1997 a team of seven Ph.D. scientists who also held that the Bible is fully God-breathed and reliable undertook a research effort to address this question head-on. Because the primary methods from which the multi-billion-year age for the earth is derived involves nuclear decay of long half-life radioactive isotopes of elements like uranium, potassium, rubidium, and neodymium, the focus of the effort was to investigate these methods to determine if there might be an overlooked clue that could explain the vast discrepancy. This eight-year effort came to be known as Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (or RATE for short) and was completed in 2005. Its technical findings were published in an 800-page technical report entitled Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative. It is available online at icr . org / rate 2 , where each of its ten chapters is posted as a separate, downloadable PDF file.

The RATE team was exuberant over the results which they conclude God had unveiled to them. In summary, they identified multiple independent lines of radioisotope evidence that the earth is merely thousands, rather than billions, of years old. They found what they consider to be clear scientific support for the conclusion that nuclear decay rates have been dramatically different, by many factors of ten, during brief episodes in the past than they are today. These brief episodes of rapid nuclear decay left hundreds of millions to billions of years’ worth of nuclear daughter products in a large fraction of the earth’s rocks. Dating methods that do not account for this non-uniform history of nuclear decay, but instead assume that nuclear decay rates have been invariant with time, therefore yield rock ages dramatically greater than the actual age.

The study deemed the most significant in support of this conclusion was the one that measured the diffusion (or migration) rate of helium in zircon crystals. This research found that the experimentally determined helium diffusion rate permits the high levels of helium measured in the zircons to persist no more than about 6,000 years. The helium in the zircons is the product of nuclear decay of uranium and its daughter products. This very short age is in stark conflict with the 1.5-billion-year age for these zircons provided by uranium-lead methods that assume time-invariant rates of nuclear decay. This short age result based on helium diffusion rates was supported by findings from two other RATE studies, one on the phenomenon of polonium radiohalos and the other on the ubiquitous presence of C-14 in organic materials dated by conventional radioisotope methods at millions to hundreds of millions of years. For convenience, the chapters describing the RATE findings for these three studies are provided below.
The 2005 book Thousands not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth by Donald DeYoung is a less technical summary of the RATE findings. A Kindle version is available.

2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 2)
In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircon (ZrSiO4) crystals recovered from a borehole in Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, New Mexico. In 2001 RATE contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of these zircons. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a He diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This contradicts the uniformitarian age of 1.5 billion years based on nuclear decay products in the same zircons. These data strongly support our hypothesis of episodes of highly accelerated nuclear decay occurring within the past few thousands of years. Such acceleration of nuclear decay rates shrinks the conventional billions-of-years timescale based on time-invariant rates down to the 6,000-year timescale of the Bible.
Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay

2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 3)
This study involved granite samples from more than fifty distinct granite bodies in Australia, North America, and Europe and more than 30,000 individual radiohalos obtained by microscopic examination of mica minerals within these granite samples. The dominant types of radiohalos identified were 210Po and 238U halos, with smaller numbers of 214Po, 218Po, and 232Th halos. The short half-lives of 218Po, 214Po, and 210Po of 3.1 minutes, 164 microseconds, and 138 days, respectively, seem to demand that Po radiohalos form in correspondingly brief spans of time. If the Po radiohalos were formed in just a few days while the fully-formed 238U radiohalos were simultaneously generated by at least 100 million years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay, radioisotope decay logically must have been accelerated. This implies that conventional radioisotope dating of rocks based on assuming constancy of decay rates must be profoundly in error. The conclusion is that accelerated radioisotope decay of 238U in zircons within the biotites rapidly formed the 238U radiohalos and produced large quantities of the short-lived 222Rn and Po isotopes. Hydrothermal fluids released by the cooling granitic magmas then transported those isotopes along the biotites’ cleavage planes to deposit the Po isotopes in chemically conducive, adjacent lattice defect sites, on average only 1 mm or less distant. The hydrothermal fluids progressively replenished the supply of Po isotopes to the deposition sites as the Po isotopes decayed to form the Po radiohalos. Because of the annealing of α-tracks above 150°C, all the radiohalos only formed below 150°C. However, the U-decay and hydrothermal fluid transport started while the granitic rocks were crystallizing at higher temperatures. Therefore, the granitic magmas must have cooled rapidly or else the short-lived Po isotopes would have decayed before radiohalos could have formed. It is thus estimated that granitic plutons must have cooled within 6–10 days, and that the various Po radiohalos formed within hours to just a few days.
Radiohalos in Granites: Evidence for Accelerated Nuclear Decay

2005 Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth: Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative (Chapter 8)
A remarkable finding since the early 1980’s is that organic samples from every level in the Phanerozoic portion of the geological record, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, display significant and reproducible amounts of C-14. Because the lifetime of C-14 is so brief, these AMS measurements pose an obvious challenge to the standard geological timescale that assigns millions to hundreds of millions of years to this part of the rock record. With a half-life of 5,730 years, C-14 decays to levels undetectable by any currently available technique after only 100,000 years (17.5 half-lives). After one million years (175 half-lives), the amount of C-14 remaining is only 3 × 10-53 of the initial C-14 concentration—so vanishingly small as to exclude even a single C-14 atom in a beginning mass of C-14 equal to the mass of the earth itself. However, in samples with uniformitarian ages between one and 500 million years, the secular peer-reviewed radiocarbon literature documents scores of examples of C-14/C ratios in the range 0.1–0.5 percent of the modern C-14/C ratio. The lower limit of this range is a factor of ten above the detection threshold of most AMS laboratories in the world. Another noteworthy observation is that the C-14/C ratio of these samples appears to be uncorrelated with their position in the geological record. RATE’s own measurement of C-14 levels in ten coal samples using one of the world’s best AMS laboratories strongly confirms both this reported range in C-14/C ratio and the lack of dependence of this ratio on position in the rock record. A straightforward but startling inference from these AMS data is that all but the very youngest fossil material in the geological record was buried contemporaneously only thousands of years ago in what must have been a major global cataclysm. This is consistent with the Biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the life on the planet, both plants and animals, in a single brief cataclysm some four to five millennia ago.
C-14 Evidence for a Recent Global Flood and a Young Earth

2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
An astonishing finding since the early 1980’s has been that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the fossil-bearing sedimentary record show consistent levels of C-14 that are well above the AMS detection level. Because of C-14's short half-life of 5,730 years, the conclusion implied by these measurements is that the organisms in all but the topmost sediment layers were buried contemporaneously merely thousands of years ago. This is consistent with the biblical account of a global Flood that destroyed most of the air-breathing life on the planet in a single brief cataclysm just a few thousand years before present.
Measurable C-14 in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model

2012 Journal of Creation 26(3)
The RATE research effort provided multiple lines of evidence that nuclear transmutation rates were dramatically higher during intervals in the past than they are observed to be today. This implies that the assumption of constant rates throughout Earth’s history, used routinely by radioisotope dating laboratories to translate isotope ratios into time, is inappropriate. Yet the question remains as to whether such measured isotope ratios might nevertheless provide valid indicators of relative time. If nuclear transformation rates at every instant are uniform throughout the earth—and there seems to be nothing to suggest otherwise—the answer seems to be yes. For creationists, a trustworthy means for determining relative ages of rocks is a tool of immense value in unravelling the earth’s physical history and gaining insight into the processes involved. This article encourages creationists who previously have been hesitant to exploit this tool of radioisotope measurement to begin to apply it to good advantage.
Do Radioisotope Methods Yield Trustworthy Relative Ages for the Earth’s Rocks?